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Messidor (VOF)
Location
Main screening room
Date
November 16th, 2022
Duration
123 min
Cycle
Alain Tanner (1929-2022)

Ce cinéaste suisse féru de politique, d'histoire et de sociologie a marqué son temps et plusieurs générations de cinéphiles. Nous programmons deux de ses films qui chacun à leur manière font un pas de côté dans son parcours d'ensemble : l'un est une observation de la société et des moeurs, précise et froide (Messidor), tandis que l'autre, solaire et radical, lorgne du côté du cinéma de la balade ou de l'errance (Dans la ville blanche).

Messidor
Directed by
Alain Tanner
Language
French
Actors
Gerald Battiaz, Clémentine Amouroux, Catherine Rétoré
Origins
Switzerland, France
Year
1979
Duration
123 min
Genre
Drama
Format
35 mm
Synopsis

Two young girls meet by chance while hitchhiking and go on an adventure, crossing Switzerland, guided by chance.

Messidor

Alain Tanner

Tanner found work at the British Film Institute in 1955, subtitling, translating, and organizing the archive. His first film, Nice Time (1957), a short documentary film about Piccadilly Circus during weekend evenings, was made with Claude Goretta. Between 1960 and 1968, Tanner returned to Switzerland, and he made more than 40 films as well as documentaries for French-language television there. In 1962, he became the co-founder of the Swiss young filmmakers' "Groupe Cinque." His first feature film, Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), won the first prize at the international film festival in Locarno. His next two films, La salamandre (1971) and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), were made in close collaboration with the art critic and novelist John Berger, who had also worked with him, to a lesser degree and without a credit, on the writing of Charles.

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The manufactured object has taken a musical form here. I wanted to make a sonata, rather than to produce ideology. I was able to make a film about non-speech, about the flight of meaning.
Alain Tanner
(1979)
About Messidor
Full cast
About Alain Tanner
Filmography
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